THE CORE EXECUTIVE AND THE RESIGNATION OF MRS THATCHER

Margaret Thatcher was seen as one of the most dominant post-war Prime Ministers and yet she was forced to resign in November 1990. Most extant explanations of her fall concentrate on relatively short-term factors such as the resignation of Sir Geoffrey Howe, the Community Charge and issues surrounding the European Community. This article argues that these accounts fail to explain Mrs Thatcher's fall because they do not place her resignation within the context of prime ministerial power. The article suggests that traditional notions of prime ministerial power are flawed because they are essentiallystatic and over-simplistic. The article develops an alternative model of prime ministerial power based on the notion of power dependence. The model is then used to demonstrate that Mrs Thatcher's fall was due to her failure to recognize her dependence on cabinet colleagues.     

The Limits of Transparency

Few would disagree that more transparency is generally a good thing for democracy. Indeed so few would disagree that an unthinking consensus has developed where transparency appears to have become the political tonic to cure all ills. Political unaccountability? Let's have more transparency. Economic inefficiency? More transparency. Too close a relationship between politicians and the press? We need more transparency. These six essays by Andrew Murray, John Lloyd, Helen Margetts, Sean Maguire, Aleks Krotosky and Kevin Marsh question the sometimes unthinking consensus about the benefits of transparency. They question it from a legal perspective, from a journalistic perspective, from a governance perspective, from a technological perspective, from practical perspective, and from a civic perspective.     

Into an Age of Multiple Austerities? Public Management and Public Service Bargains across OECD Countries

This article focuses on Public Service Bargains (PSBs) in the Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) world in an age of austerity and makes four main claims. First, both logic and recent history suggest that states can respond to financial crises in more than one way. Second, we argue that the pressures on existing PSBs are not all the same in this group of states, given observable differences in their financial vulnerability. Third, we analyze countries' differential exposure to two other major challenges, namely, that of population aging and environmental risk. Fourth, we show that those areas of vulnerability can counteract one another in some cases but be mutually reinforcing in others, and we argue that “triply vulnerable” states in a composite analysis are those likely to face the strongest pressure to change their existing PSBs. We conclude that while homogenizing pressures cannot be ignored, PSB diversity is likely to continue.     

“EXPERIENCE OF THE EXPECTED?” RACE AND ETHNICITY DIFFERENCES IN THE EFFECTS OF POLICE CONTACT ON YOUTH*

Proponents of police reform have called for changes in the way police interact with citizens, particularly with people of color. The rationale, in part, is that when people have more favorable perceptions of their police encounters, they view the police as more just and are more willing to cooperate and comply with the law. To assess whether perceptions of police‐initiated encounters shape law‐related outcomes, we examine how satisfaction with treatment during prior police contact affects procedural injustice, reporting intentions, norms supporting the use of violence, and delinquency. We also explore whether these relationships vary among Blacks, Whites, and Latinos. Our results indicate that youth who have been stopped or arrested fare worse than their counterparts with no police‐initiated contact; however, the potentially negative ramifications of these encounters on all outcomes except violence norms are generally mitigated when youth are satisfied with their treatment. The effects of contact are mostly invariant across racial/ethnic groups when a robust set of control variables are included. We conclude that changing the perceptions of youth regarding how they are treated by the police may mitigate some of the harms of being stopped or arrested, but we caution that these perceptions are shaped by factors aside from police behavior during encounters.     

CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT OF FEMALE OFFENDERS

Two theoretical approaches tend to dominate the literature on the manner in which exoffenders reintegrate into society. These are the structural and subcultural models. The structural model (Merton, 1938; Cloward and Ohlin, 1960: Ohlin, 1970) posits that closing of the legitimate opportunity structure leads to secondary deviation and it also traces initial criminality to a discrepancy between means and ends for achieving success goals. The subcultural model (Cohen, 1955; Pownall, 1969) views the primary factors explaining the failure of the exoffender to adjust to society as influences exerted by the criminal subculture. These have traditionally been treated as competing theoretical models. The research reported here sought to evaluate these two approaches and to combine them in an applied framework called differential integration. Data on 874 exoffenders provided with job placements during 1976 show that structural variables tended to differentiate the employment outcomes of exoffenders much more than subcultural variables and that there is partial support for the differential integration concept .     

ECONOMIC MAN AND ORIGINAL

Abstract. Are we descended from Adam or from rational economic homunculi? Rational-man theories usually favour the latter. But all four main versions run into famous puzzles of collective action. The cause is an underlying Humean philosophy of mind, by which desires, not reasons, move the rational man. When this is replaced, the idea of expressive rationality can be made to work. It requires a model of man, which gives human nature less variables and more constants. Among the constants there needs to be a pride, which spurs men both to create a social framework and to undermine their own creation. The old name for this source of social contradictions is Original Sin.